Henry Ford's Revolution of the Assembly Line

Henry Ford's Revolution of the Assembly Line 

With his famous Model T car introduced in 1908, Ford was quickly becoming the face the of the young automobile industry. The Model T was a relatively inexpensive car, but Ford wanted everyone to have the opportunity of owning one. Ford had originally planned for the Model T to be the first car "available to the multitude." He realized that he needed to find a way to lower the manufacturing cost. In order to do this, he had to find a way to build them more efficiently. He ended up focusing on four things to achieve this: having interchangeable parts, continuous flow, division of labor, and reducing wasted effort. 

Ford had been trying to increase his factories' efficiency for some time now. For earlier models of his car, he had workers arrange the parts of the car in a row on the floor. They then moved the automobile that was being built along this "track" with skids. By the time Ford reached his Model T, the process was broken down into 84 steps. He then trained each of his workers to be able to do one of those steps extremely efficiently. Using interchangeable parts meant that the same type of part would be used in building the cars. This allowed a low skilled laborer to be able to work them extremely efficiently. Worker specialization ended making it tough for the workers to find new jobs if they were ever fired. Despite this, Ford paid his men excellent wages for their work. In addition, he had machines that would stamp out parts automatically. 

The most significant innovation of Ford's quest for efficiency was the assembly line. Ford put "moving lines" into his factories which allowed workers to complete parts of the car piece by piece. In 1913, he unveiled the moving-chassis assembly line. He went a step further and constructed a mechanized belt for his factories.

The assembly line made it possible for mass production to really start taking form in America. For workers, it even cut down their work day.  It lowered the prices of items and would eventually give way to consumerism taking form in the country during the Roaring 20s. 

Sources: 

http://www.history.com/topics/model-t

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/dt13as.html

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/fords-assembly-line-starts-rolling